There are almost as many methods of training horses as there are trainers.
But for renowned horsemanship trainer Steve Smith, of Cornerstone Horse Training in Scurry, Texas, there’s more to it than working with an animal.
“I’m to the point in my career that I want to train people more than horses,” Smith said. “It’s like, if I can train your horse to jump to the moon and back but you don’t know how to work the controls, you’re wasting your time and money.”
Since Smith and many other trainers host horsemanship clinics around the country, they’re often referred to as “clinicians.” For the second straight year, Smith and his mustang, Smoking Gun, and numerous other clinicians (many well-known in their field) gathered in June at Golden Hills Trail Rides and Resort in Raymondville for the Mustang Family Reunion Ride, hosted by Texans Laura Scott Dawson and her husband Eric.
During the week-long event, Smith and his fellow trainers took turns teaching various techniques inside Golden Hills’ arena and other sections of the venue.
“This is what I do is all about,” he said. “People who love mustangs and horses getting together to learn and have fun.”
Smith is a former police officer who got into horsemanship training by following in the footsteps of his wife, Wendy.
“She was already working as a trainer, and had a lot of experience and quite a good reputation,” he said. “When we got married, we decided I was going to start training, and I actually did a four-year apprenticeship under her.”
Life changes have resulted in half of the couple continuing with training horses while the other works at home.
“We have three kids and we home-school them,” Smith said, “so that’s my wife’s job now and I pretty much run the business. She does a lot of office work for us and for our church, but she doesn’t come to the barn much or have much to do with the horses because she’s afraid if she gets out there she’ll get that little bug.
“But she knows where the Lord has her now and she’s doing what she’s supposed to be doing.”
Smith has been a professional horse trainer for about a dozen years. He said he doesn’t mind taking aspects of other trainers’ techniques and working them into his own regimen.
“The last year of my apprenticeship, I started taking an interest in other trainers and I studied closely what a lot of them did,” Smith said. “Then I started developing my own style that was kind of a soup made up of what everybody else did.
“I now have my own technique, but I’m still learning. Once you think you know all you need to know, that’s it – you’ve gone as far as you’re going to go.”
The annual Reunion Ride is a great place for Smith and his peers to not only better their students, but themselves as well.
“I love coming to these events where there’s a lot of clinicians in one place,” he said. “I get to learn a lot and there are a lot of people here I learn from. Sometimes I’ll see someone work a lot less hard than I do to get similar results, and I think about how I can blend what they’re doing with what I already know.”
Training people isn’t always easy, Smith said.
“A lot of them have what I call a Roy Rogers and John Wayne mentality,” he said. “As kids, they watched those guys jump on their horses and chase the bad guys or ride off into the sunset, and they were just pulling this way and that way and the horse just went. That’s what they expect to do on their horse, but that’s just not how it works.”
How it works requires riders to develop a multi-faceted approach, Smith said.
“To properly ride a horse, you’re using your hands, seat and legs in harmony,” he said. “It’s just like with an orchestra – if you have only one instrument, you don’t have harmony, but if you add a few more, you can have harmony.”
Smith often speaks of “pressure,” a term used frequently by many horsemanship trainers in descriptions of various techniques.
“When the average person hears that term, the first thing that comes to mind is physical pressure,” Smith said. “But pressure doesn’t have to be physical contact, it can be as simple as body language, or even a look. It’s a very important thing to understand when working with a horse. It’s crucial in making a horse know who’s in charge.”
Smith works with as many as eight horses every day. He and other trainers agree that no amount of knowledge is any good to a horse if its rider doesn’t know the right cues and commands.
“I can teach a horse to do all kinds of things, but if you don’t know how to communicate with your horse, it’s not going to work for you,” Smith said. “It’s kind of sad, but a lot of people just send their horse to me and when they get the finished product, they’ll ask how I get their horse to do something. We even offer one free lesson per week and a lot of the people don’t come. I tell them, ‘you should have come.’
“I like to compare it to a marriage – being married isn’t 50-50, it’s 100-100. The same with a horse and rider – I need a horse to give me 100-percent, but the horse needs the rider to give 100-percent, too, and not put it all off on the horse.”
The bottom line is, a horse is only capable of being as good as its rider.
“If a horse is at a high level, but a rider is at a low level, that horse is going to come down to the rider’s level,” Smith said. “The rider has to raise his or her standards for that horse to perform its best.”
As a fan of mustangs, Smith is supportive of the Bureau of Land Management’s wild horse and burro management and adoption programs. Smoking Gun ran wild on a BLM range in the Black Mountains area of southeastern Nevada before being adopted by Smith.
“Mustangs are good horses,” Smith said. “I stay out of all the political stuff that kind of surrounds the BLM, but whatever the politics are, I see mustangs as horses, and they’re good horses and affordable horses.”
Smith (who is sponsored by JW Brooks Custom Hats) will host a TV program beginning next year called “Long Live the Mustang” that will air on HRTV (“the network for horse sports”). He has been shooting episodes for the show for several months and had a video crew with him at Golden Hills to shoot some footage.
“This is going to help them,” Smith said. “I like to talk about the bond a person can form with a mustang – it’s not like with any other horse. But unless you’ve ever taken a wild horse and put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into it, you could really never understand.”
Smith said his goals are different than they were not that long ago.
“There was a time when all I wanted was to be ‘the next big clinician,’” he said. “But I’m past that now, and I realize God has me where He wants me and I shouldn’t make this an idol. This isn’t eternal, and I can’t take it with me, so to speak.”
With age creeping up on him, Smith knows he won’t keep up his current pace forever.
“When you get right down to it, what I do is really fun,” he said. “But working with as many horses as I do can be hard, and I know there’s a time coming pretty soon when I’ll slow down.”
To learn more about Steve Smith and his horsemanship training techniques and schedule, log onto www.cornerstonehorsetraining.com/.
Once you think you know all you need to know, that’s it – you’ve gone as far as you’re going to go.”
HORSEMANSHIP CLINICIAN STEVE SMITH